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Othniel Rowland, Anthropologist, Bigamist, Cult Member

(Thebes, 1804-1970)

After Jean Roland, Othniel, my great-great-grandfather’s brother,
was the most storied of the Rowlands. Even the Celestes liked to talk
about him, because he too had run away from his family, and
because what happened after that was so odd.

Born just a handful of
years after the Civil War, Othniel grew up with a feeling that he’d
missed the action. No sooner did he finish college than he had
run off to New York, where he worked briefly as a taxidermist for the
then-brand-new Museum of Natural History, assembling montages of birds
in their native habitats. He married; he ran off again, this time to New
Mexico. What he did there is unclear. The Celestes told me he was an actor
in a traveling theater, but my grandfather said it was the Museum that sent him West, to catalog Indian skulls.
Imagine the two occupations, actor and gravedigger, as vectors; now add
them. The resultant: anthropology. A long arrow leading to masked dances
in the desert. Othniel lived for a time with the Navajo, and married an
Indian woman (so the Celestes said; my grandfather didn’t allow
that they were actually married) without having divorced or even notified
his first wife. He watched the Navajo dances and wrote about some of them.
He became well-known in anthropological circles: he was one of the few
scientists in the West who took an interest in living Indians.

His story turns on a daughter’s death. Othniel’s eldest and
dearest (I don’t know her name) died while Othniel was in
the desert—an uncomfortable parallel to my own story. He came East
with the terrible feeling that he had missed the action yet again. His
wife would no longer speak to him. His second daughter had married and
moved South. Alone and grieving, Othniel fell under the spell of a certain
Philips, the charlatan head of a “community” (call it a cult)
in Ohio (not far from Dayton, actually) that practiced Personal
Flight, in other words, they believed that human beings could fly
without the assistance of devices of any sort. Othniel went to live with
them for a time. The story does not say whether he flew or not. My grandfather
said it was impossible, but the Celestes were inclined to believe that
he did.

Eventually Othniel returned to New Mexico, to his Indian wife. He never studied the Navajo dances again. Studying, he had come
to believe, was a dangerous inattention
to life; and life, Othniel believed, in his old age, had to be watched
ceaselessly, like a wild animal, lest it attack. He sent rugs home to
his brother in Thebes. He was buried outside of Santa Fe, where his children’s
children’s children’s children now reside.

After I moved to New Haven, I tried to write a novel about Othniel. I got about halfway through it before I gave up. But now here I am with a theoretically unlimited amount of space at my disposal, so…